Science Has No National Borders: Harry C. Kelly and the Reconstruction of Science and Technology in Postwar Japan by Hideo Yoshikawa, Joanne Kauffman

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1055 ahead of full-blown theoretical understandings and to developing designs with large margins for error. And some scientists recognized this, as when the authors note that George Kistiakowsky stopped sub­ mitting progress reports in May 1945 with the comment, “The activi­ ties of X-Division have lost all semblance of research and have become so largely production and inspection and testing that their brief sum­ mary here seems impractical” (p. 315). And it is not clear whether his colleagues were being complimentary when they labeled Lewis Fuseli, assigned to develop detonators for the implosion device, “a ‘solid engineering type’” (p. 301). Yet the book adds new examples to the list of cases where engineers saved the Manhattan Project scien­ tists much embarrassment. For example, Williams Parsons, whose en­ gineering experience with naval ordnance guided development of the uranium weapon, also insisted on detailed preparations for drop­ ping the weapons, despite the scientists’ assumptions that this would be a simple matter. It may be that the key research legacy of Los Alamos was to begin accelerating the development of links between science and engineering that Stuart Leslie discusses in his study of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford after 1945. In any event, the strength of this book is its detailed examination of research efforts, and it will be of great interest to anyone interested in the full technical details of designing and fabricating the first atomic weapons. By definition the book is episodic, but unlike many jointly authored volumes, the seams between the different authors’ chapters are hardly visible. The research is impeccable, and the new material from interviews and classified documents adds much to the story. My only real complaint concerns a lamentable number of typos that should have been caught in proofreading. Bruce E. Seely Dr. Seely is associate professor of history at Michigan Technological University and secretary of the Society for the History ofTechnology. He has written about the history of engineering research in academia and in government and is working with Terry Reynolds on a history of engineering education. Science Has No National Borders: Harry C. Kelly and the Reconstruction of Science and Technology in Postwar Japan. By Hideo Yoshikawa and Joanne Kauffman. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Pp. xvii-t-137; illustrations, notes, appendix, index. $22.50. This book hardly demonstrates that science has no national bor­ ders. It is more important than that, for it demonstrates what is possi­ ble—under favorable circumstances—in the administration of sci­ ence. It is a rare case history of bureaucracy in action—successfully! With the end of World War II in 1945, the United States, with its allies but not much influenced by them, set up an occupation govern­ 1056 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ment in Japan, controlling and more or less duplicating the bureau­ cracy Japan already had. This temporary government was invented by “Washington” and the American army, neither renowned for skill at this kind of thing. “Science” had been no significant concern of the American bureaucracy (nor of that of Japan) and would hardly have been a concern of the Occupation were it not for the atomic bomb. But that entity motivated the insertion of a Scientific and Tech­ nical Branch into the Occupation bureaucracy, and a search for who­ ever was quickly available with a modicum of claim to competence in such matters, to check on the activities of Japanese research labora­ tories. Efforts to staff the branch suffered from the war-weary condition of virtually everybody. So a military officer, Brigadier John O’Brien, was appointed, notwithstanding his handicap—as an Australian, clas­ sified information required for the pursuit of his mission was inacces­ sible to him. But by the end of 1945 two Americans, Robert Fox and Harry Kelly, were hired to assist him. Both had seen “war work,” though neither had been involved in the Manhattan Project (Kelly “knew nothing” of it). But they were professional physicists—and they were amenable to adventure. So was I, an engineering officer on a small ship in Yokohama har­ bor who heard about “recruiting” in Tokyo and managed to be trans­ ferred to...